Summer heat builds through the morning like a slow fever. By noon, the valley shimmers with rising air, and the rice paddies stretch in geometric patches of deep green. The plants have grown tall enough now to hide the water beneath, but moisture still rises from the hidden channels between the stalks, invisible columns of vapor climbing toward the stratosphere.
I watch the afternoon sky from my deck as clouds begin to gather overhead. First, small white clouds form above the mountain ridges. Then they thicken and tower, fed by the valley’s moisture, climbing higher until their tops flatten against the atmospheric ceiling fifteen kilometers up. The anvil heads spread like hammered metal against blue sky.
By four o’clock, the light changes. What started as brilliant sunshine dims to a pewter glow, and the sky takes on the color of wet slate. The rice fields below turn an almost electric green against the darkening heavens—that deep emerald of mature stalks that seems to hold its own light, intensified by the contrast with storm clouds.
Then the slate gray tears open.
A silver fork splits the sky, branching downward in a pattern too quick for the eye to follow completely. Thunder rolls across the valley a few seconds later, the sound bouncing off mountain walls and returning as echoes. Another flash, closer this time, illuminates the entire landscape for a split second—rice paddies, farmhouses, power lines all frozen in harsh white light and sharp black shadows.
The Japanese word for lightning is inazuma—literally “rice spouse.” In ancient times, tsuma was gender-neutral, meaning either husband or wife, and the belief held that lightning mated with the rice plants. The timing made sense: storms arrived during the rice fruition period, so people believed lightning would fertilize the crop.
The first fat raindrops arrive just as another bolt illuminates the valley. In twenty minutes, the storm will have passed, leaving the air washed clean and the rice stalks bending under the weight of fresh water. But for now, I’m watching a marriage between electricity and agriculture, sky and earth, meteorology dressed in ancient metaphor.
Watching this storm build from the paddies’ own moisture, that metaphor captures something real about the cycle unfolding overhead. The storm that builds from the fields’ own water—rising invisibly from the hidden channels, climbing fifteen kilometers to the stratosphere, condensing into thunderheads—returns to earth as both lightning and rain. It’s the paddies’ own moisture, transformed by altitude and convection, coming home as electrical fire and fresh rainfall. Ancient poetry describing cosmic marriage, modern science explaining evaporation—both tracking the same closed loop between earth and sky.
The thunder moves east, chasing its lightning toward distant mountains. The rice fields settle back into their afternoon quiet, deeper green than before.